Document type: capture

Contract

This page defines the capture document type — one entry in the document types taxonomy. The general contract every document follows (frontmatter, state, linking, tags) lives on the taxonomy page; this page carries only what is specific to capture.

Contract

A pre-sprint idea — see Capture in the glossary.

Buckets

Captures live in one of four buckets under doc/agile/product_backlog/:

Bucket	Path	Purpose
`inbox/`	untriaged	Landing zone for new captures; not yet assessed
`next/`	next candidates	Concrete ideas ready to pull into an upcoming sprint
`deferred/`	long-horizon	Valid but not soon; revisit during future planning
`discarded/`	explicitly rejected	Decided against; kept for rationale, not for promotion

A capture starts in inbox/ and is triaged to next/, deferred/, or discarded/ via compass capture file <slug> <bucket>. It is never deleted on rejection — discarded/ preserves the rationale.

Key properties

Folder: doc/agile/product_backlog/{inbox,next,deferred,discarded}/<slug>.org
Level: cross (product-level; not tied to a sprint or version)
Slug: snake_case. Becomes the filename.
Title: free-form (the idea itself); no type prefix.
(no term): Not stateful — no TODO, no * Status table. Effective states: pending (file in a bucket) and promoted (converted to a story).
ID preservation: on promotion the destination story.org keeps the capture's :ID: so existing links keep resolving. #+type: flips from capture to story; the file moves into the sprint folder; the capture is no longer in its bucket.

Compass commands

# Create a new capture in inbox (preferred entry point)
compass capture --note "The idea text"

# Triage an inbox capture to a bucket
compass capture file <slug> next|deferred|discarded

# Print promotion instructions (goto command to run)
compass capture promote <slug>

How to create

See New capture in the codegen recipe for direct scaffolding via codegen.

Required sections (in this order)

Blurb — one sentence linking the word "capture" to the glossary entry and naming the bucket.
* Note — the idea, one paragraph. (* What / * Why are acceptable synonyms for more developed captures.)
* Actions — optional; concrete next steps if known.
* See also — related captures, knowledge docs, components. Optional.